Over the course of human history, the sciences, and biology in particular, have often been manipulated to cause immense human suffering. For example, biology has been used to justify eugenic programs, forced sterilization, human experimentation, and death camps—all in an attempt to support notions of racial superiority. By investigating the past, the contributors to _Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins_ hope to better prepare us to discern ideological abuse of science when it occurs in the future. Denis R. Alexander (...) and Ronald L. Numbers bring together fourteen experts to examine the varied ways science has been used and abused for nonscientific purposes from the fifteenth century to the present day. Featuring an essay on eugenics from Edward J. Larson and an examination of the progress of evolution by Michael J. Ruse, _Biology and Ideology_ examines uses both benign and sinister, ultimately reminding us that ideological extrapolation continues today. An accessible survey, this collection will enlighten historians of science, their students, practicing scientists, and anyone interested in the relationship between science and culture. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to develop a framework for the origin of foresight. Following a review of arguments for foresight as genetically inherited versus environmentally acquired, the understanding of foresight is expanded through a behaviorist perspective and through an evolutionary perspective. The framework established makes it possible to deploy evolutionary logic to explain foresight as well as to enhance our understanding of foresight, both on individual (e.g., managerial) and aggregated (e.g., organizational) levels.

In this paper, I give an account of how our hominin ancestors evolved a conscious ability I call scenario visualization that enabled them to manufacture novel tools so as to survive and flourish in the ever-changing and complex environments in which they lived. I first present the ideas and arguments put forward by evolutionary psychologists that the mind evolved certain mental capacities as adaptive responses to environmental pressures. Specifically, Steven Mithen thinks that the mind has evolved cognitive fluidity, viz., an (...) ability to exchange information flexibly between and among mental modules. Showing the deficiency in Mithen’s view, I then argue that the flexible exchange of information between and among modules together with scenario visualization is what explains the ability to construct the novel tools needed to survive and flourish in the environments in which our hominin ancestors resided. Finally, I trace the development of the multi-purposed javelin, from its meager beginnings as a stick, in order to illustrate scenario visualization in novel tool manufacturing. (shrink)

Abstract. Biology has been able to systematize and order its vast information through the theory of evolution, offering the possibility of a more engaged dialogue and possible integration with religious insights and emotions. Using Judaism as a focus, this essay examines ways that contemporary evolutionary theory offers room for balancing freedom and constraint, serendipity and intentionality in ways fruitful to Jewish thought and expression. This essay then looks at a productive integration of Judaism and biology in the examples of co-evolution, (...) environmental ethics, the place of humans within nature, the relationship of mind and brains, and the ways that individual and group identity blur. (shrink)

It is not inconsistent to believe in both creation and in Darwinian evolution at the same time as rejecting creationism, and endorsing a realist stance about religious and scientific language. Belief in creation is argued to be every bit as defensible as Darwinism, and reconcilable with phenomena such as predation. If (as Richard Dawkins holds) evolution is the only possible pathway to life as we know it, then a life-loving creator would select this pathway. If it is not the only (...) possible pathway, the alternatives could well preclude the conditions of freedom among creatures, and if so, then evolution remains the pathway that a life‐lovingand freedom-loving creator would select. Evolution, however, can be argued to be more than a pathway, because of the intrinsic value of the flourishing lives (nonhuman as well as human) that emerge at every stage, and this intrinsic value supplies a further ground for belief in creation. (These are among the conclusions of my recent book, Creation, Evolution and Meaning, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.). (shrink)

Adaptations during phylogenesis or ontogenesis can occur either by maintaning constant or by increasing the informational content of the organism. In the former case the increasing adaptations to external perturbation are achieved by increasing the rate of genome replication; the increased amount of DNA reflects an increase of total but not of law informational content. In the latter case the adaptations are achieved by either istructionist or evolutionary mechanism or a combination of both. Evolutionary adaptations occur during ontogenesis mainly in (...) the brain-mind, immunological and receptor systems and involve a repertoire of receptors that are., clonally distributed, genome-conditioned and amplified by somatic mutation. Specificity and intensity of responses are achieved a posteriori as a result of natural selection of the clones. The major adaptations during phylogenesis are accompanied by increased complexity. They have been attributed to shifts, short in time and space, against the entropic drive and thus occur notwithstanding the entropic drive and the second law of thermodynamics. The alternative view, is that the generation of complexity is due to the second law of thermodynamics in its extended formulation which includes Prigogine's theorem of minimum entropy production. This view requires however that natural selection provides the biological system with structures that bring the reactions within Onsager's range. The hierarchical organization of the natural world thus reflects a stratified thermodynamic stability. As the evolutionary adaptations generate new information they may be assimilated to Marxwell demon type of processes. (shrink)

The principle of natural selection is stated. It connects fitness values (actual reproductive success) with expected fitness values. The term 'adaptedness' is used for expected fitness values. The principle of natural selection explains differential fitness in terms of relative adaptedness. It is argued that this principle is absolutely central to Darwinian evolutionary theory. The empirical content of the principle of natural selection is examined. It is argued that the principle itself has no empirical biological content, but that the presuppositions of (...) its applicability are empirical. They form the empirical biological core of evolutionary theory. (shrink)

Most of the free will debate operates under the assumption that classic determinism and indeterminism are the only metaphysical options available. Through an analysis of Dennett’s view of free will as gradually evolving this article attempts to point to emergentist, interactivist and temporal metaphysical options, which have been left largely unexplored by contemporary theorists. Whereas, Dennett himself holds that “the kind of free will worth wanting” is compatible with classic determinism, I propose that his models of determinism fit poorly with (...) his evolutionary theory and naturalist commitments. In particular, his so-called “intuition pumps” seem to rely on the assumption that reality will have a compositional bottom layer where appearance and reality coincide. I argue that instead of positing this and other “unexplained explainers” we should allow for the heretical possibility that there might not be any absolute bottom, smallest substances or universal laws, but relational interactions all the way down. Through the details of Dennett’s own account of the importance of horizontal transmission in evolution and the causal efficacy of epistemically limited but complex layered “selves,” it is argued that our autonomy is linked to the ability to affect reality by controlling appearances. (shrink)

This chapter deals with the way our psychology and actions a scaffolded by their environment but also the tensions that can appear between individual and environment, both at the level of biology and culture. The chapter is grounded in an analysis of the early 20th century theoretical biologist Jacob von Uexkull and his notion of "Umwelt" or "surround world". But also raises the question of whether organisms fit their environment as neatly as Uexkull and many later thinkers have proposed or (...) assumed. (shrink)

Failing to acknowledge substantial differences between Darwinism and neo-Darwinism impedes evolutionary biology. Darwin described evolution as the outcome of interactions between the nature of the organism and the nature of the conditions, each relatively autonomous but both historically and spatially intertwined. Furthermore, he postulated that the nature of the organism was more important than the nature of the conditions, leading to natural selection as an inevitable emergent product of biological systems. The neo-Darwinian tradition assumed a creative rather than selective view (...) of natural selection, with the nature of the organism determined by the nature of the conditions, rendering the nature of the organism and temporal contingency unnecessary. Contemporary advances in biology, specifically the phylogenetics revolution and evo-devo, underscore the significance of history and the nature of the organism in biology. Darwinism explains more biology better, and better resolves apparent anomalies between living systems and more general natural laws, than does neo-Darwinism. The “extended” or “expanded” synthesis currently called for by neo-Darwinians is Darwinism. (shrink)

Progress has become a suspect concept in evolutionary biology, not the least because the core concepts of neo-Darwinism do not support the idea that evolution is progressive. There have been a number of attempts to account for directionality in evolution through additions to the core hypotheses of neo-Darwinism, but they do not establish progressiveness, and they are somewhat of an ad hoc collection. The standard account of fitness and adaptation can be rephrased in terms of information theory. From this, an (...) information of adaptation can be defined in terms of a fitness function. The information of adaptation is a measure of the mutual information between biota and their environment. If the actual state of adaptation lags behind the state of optimal adaptation, then it is possible for the information of adaptation to increase indefinitely. Since adaptations are functional, this suggests the possibility of progressive evolution in the sense of increasing adaptation. Keywords: evolution, information, adaptation, fitness, entropy, progress.. (shrink)

Evolutionary medicine (EM) is an emerging field of medical studies that uses evolutionary theory to explain the ultimate causes of health and disease. The field’s main objective is to reconceptualize bodily vulnerabilities and pathophysiologies as evolutionary tradeoffs—many the result of an evolutionary mismatch between our ancient genome and modern lifestyle. This conceptual shift allows EM to describe health and disease in terms of adaptive functions and to prescribe treatments that best complement our evolved bodies. The goal is to “transform the (...) way patients and doctors see disease” (Nesse and Williams 1994, p. 245) in order to harness a renewed “feeling for the organism as a product of natural selection” .. (shrink)

To most people through history it has always seemed obvious that the teeming diversity of life, the uncanny perfection with which living organisms are equipped to survive and multiply, and the bewildering complexity of living machinery, can only have come about through divine creation. Yet repeatedly it has occurred to isolated thinkers that there might be an alternative to supernatural creation.

The upshot of the No Free Lunch theorems is that averaged over all fitness functions, evolutionary computation does no better than blind search (see Dembski 2002, ch 4 as well as Dembski 2005 for an overview). But this raises a question: How does evolutionary computation obtain its power since, clearly, it is capable of doing better than blind search? One approach is to limit the fitness functions (see Igel and Toussaint 2001). Another, illustrated in David Fogel’s work on automated checker (...) and chess playing (see, for instance, Chellapilla and Fogel 1999 and Fogel et al. 2004) and, more recently, given a theoretical underpinning by David Wolpert and William Macready (2005), is to limit optimization problems to search spaces consisting of agents that play competitively against one another. In this brief note, I focus on the latter attempt to get around the force of No Free Lunch. (shrink)

Conceptions of adaptation have varied in the history of genetic Darwinism depending on whether what is taken to be focal is the process of adaptation, adapted states of populations, or discrete adaptations in individual organisms. I argue that Theodosius Dobzhansky’s view of adaptation as a dynamical process contrasts with so-called “adaptationist” views of natural selection figured as “design-without-a-designer” of relatively discrete, enumerable adaptations. Correlated with these respectively process and product oriented approaches to adaptive natural selection are divergent pictures of organisms (...) themselves as developmental wholes or as “bundles” of adaptations. While even process versions of genetical Darwinism are insufficiently sensitive to the fact much of the variation on which adaptive selection works consists of changes in the timing, rate, or location of ontogenetic events, I argue that articulations of the Modern Synthesis influenced by Dobzhansky are more easily reconciled with the recent shift to evolutionary developmentalism than are versions that make discrete adaptations central. (shrink)

: This paper addresses the appropriation of theories of evolution by nineteenth-century feminists, focusing on the critical response to Darwin's The Descent of Man by Eliza Burt Gamble (The Evolution of Woman, 1893) and Antoinette Brown Blackwell (The Sexes Throughout Nature, 1875) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's social evolutionism. For Gilman, evolutionism was a revolutionary resource for feminism, one of its greatest hopes. Gamble and Blackwell revisit Darwin's data with the aim of locating, amidst his ostensive conclusions to the contrary, his (...) implicit "defense" of either the equality (Blackwell) or the superiority (Gamble) of women. This article identifies the reasons for, and limitations of, this enthusiasm. To some extent, the basis of this feminism is provided by its keen perception of disparities between what a text does, and what it says it is doing. But these feminists did not think through the implications for their own rhetoric about race hierarchy. Darwin's trope of the "savage" would return in the work of some of these feminists, occasionally displaced or rejected, but usually reiterated, and sometimes integral to the feminism in question. (shrink)

In this paper I argue the best examples of the methods in the evolutionary social sciences don’t actually resemble either of the two methods called “Adaptive Thinking” or “Reverse Engineering” described by evolutionary psychologists. Both AT and RE have significant problems. Instead, the best adaptationist work in the ESSs seems to be based on and is aiming at a different method that avoids the problems of AT and RE: it is a behavioral level method that starts with information about both (...) the trait in question and knowledge of the EEA. I describe some examples from the literature, and suggest how a behavioral level ESS might still contribute to the discovery and understanding of human psychology. Finally, I describe some remaining problems for adaptationist reasoning of this kind. (shrink)